[debhelper-devel] Bug#766795: afterstep not binnmu safe and not installable in sid

[Robert Luberda]

Simon McVittie writes:

> The solution proposed by Robert Luberda seems to be to change debhelper
> so that foo-bin Depends: foo-common (= ${source:Version}) instead,
> in the case where foo-common is arch-independent. However, that would
> mean that the changelog.Debian.amd64.gz (or whatever) for foo-bin
> is not provided by anything, so the binNMU is not documented anywhere.

Yes, but is it important to have it documented? To be honest I can't
really understand why autobuilders adds those changelog entries, I can
only guess that it is easier to force new version of package this way.

Please also note that normal autobuilds do not document theirs normal
operation into changelog, even though they could use (for various
reasons)  versions of build-dependent packages different than maintainer
used for they source+binary upload.


> Is that itself considered to be a bad thing, and possibly a policy violation?

Which point of the policy?

See this footnote 116:
 [116] Please note that this does not override the section on changelog
files
  below, so the file /usr/share/doc/package/changelog.Debian.gz must refer
  to the changelog for the current version of package in question. In
  practice, this means that the sources of the target and the destination
  of the symlink must be the same (same source package and version).

AFAIK binNMU does not change "source package and [source] version".


> 
> The solution I used in telepathy-glib was to link the documentation of
> all arch-dependent packages to the shared library (which in practice
> they all depend on anyway), and leave the one arch-independent
> package alone:

Which means that you assume that nobody will never do binNMU of the
arch-independent package :) (Yes, I know that most probably such
assumption is correct, but anyway...)

Regards,
robert